Songs in the Light
by thegreatroshen
Summary: Five years have passed since the events of The Voice of Life. Rill has traveled the world and grown in power, but the Calamity has not been idle either. Events have come to a head, and Rill is finally ready to return to her friends and rally them for a final battle with the fate of the Planet at stake. Part two of two. Covers roughly the original game.


**A/N: As you may all recall, at the end of The Voice of Life, I promised a preview at Christmas. The rough schedule outlined on the profile still applies, but if you haven't read that, know that it's going to be about another three to six months at least before this story begins regular posting. This here is just the prologue. With that said, Merry Christmas and enjoy!**

Reno knocked back another glass of...something. He had long since passed the point of caring what he drank so long as it was alcohol.

He was reminiscing to himself, like he usually did whenever he went out drinking when he was...technically supposed to be working. No one really cared. Given that he had long since earned his position as a Turk executive, one of the most skilled agents in the department, most of his rule breaking was passed over with a wink.

It had not been a good day.

Hell, it had not been a good year.

 _Things sure have changed._ Reno took up the refilled glass with a nod to the bartender.

It had been almost five years since everything started to go to hell.

Attack after sabotage after assassination from AVALANCHE. First, it was revealed that the company Vice President, Rufus Shinra, had been leaking information to AVALANCHE to use them as a cat's paw to dispose of his father. Years of frustration, deaths and general chaos attributed to one man maneuvering for power. The rocket launch ceremony to kick off the Shinra space program failed due to sabotage and one woman not wanting to send men into space with unsafe equipment.

Then Corel burned because of the terrorists. Only Sephiroth's blatant threat of turning on the company kept President Shinra from blaming the residents of the village itself for the meltdown at the reactor.

And information gotten at that time revealed just how deep Fuhito's madness ran. Using an ancient summon to send all life on the Planet back to where it all started...Terrence had been out of action for years, knocked into a coma via Mako Poisoning. They hadn't known about it, and were desperately trying to stop AVALANCHE now that they knew.

Pres Shinra didn't think that there was much of anything to worry about, writing off Terrence's report as hallucinations stemming from his condition. But the Turks believed him.

Veld was cut loose and his death ordered once it was discovered that his amnesiac daughter was actually AVALANCHE's leader. _No loose ends. No security breaches, not even for family._ Tseng hadn't been able to refuse the order outright, but he was moving pretty slowly in getting it done. Actually, he had dug out the old procedures manual and was taking everything step...by...step... Veld wanted to help his daughter, Felicia, or Elfe as she went by nowadays. Fuhito's plan would sacrifice her to keep the Zirconiade summon shard stable and useable.

Now all the Turks were scattered around the world. On the run because they were just done with Shinra's BS.

First it had been Rill, a company executive and the sole reason that morale was at an all time high. The old hats were throwing in the towel because they had watched Nerilka Thomas grow from a reportedly scrappy, tough tomboy into a poised young lady who all but ran the company. The younger generation viewed her as one of them.

Reno hadn't been willing to take the attempted assassination of one of his closest friends lying down.

Gunther Shinra had ordered Rill attacked, reportedly killed, and handed over to Hojo on the grounds of her being an Ancient. As if that made everything she had ever done negligible and useless.

Hojo had even protested! He said, quite rightly, that Rill was most effective right where she was and they had another Ancient on hand to guide them to the Promised Land.

Likely it had been the old man's paranoia that had him sign off on the order for the Turks to quietly dispose of her.

Veld had taken one look at what he was told to do, then turned around and handed the order over to Terrence, who promptly burned it.

" _Get her out. I don't care what you have to do. Just get her out of Midgar and set up in such a way that we couldn't possibly find her."_ Terrence Jackson, aka Legend, a Turk who had once been called the 'Grim Reaper' for his ruthless and efficient battle style in the Wutian War.

Rill called him 'Uncle T' and had him wrapped around her finger.

He got her out alright. In fact, he got her out so effectively that Reno, and the rest of the world, didn't have a single clue as to where she was right now.

Reno thought Sephiroth was going to go completely insane when he came storming back from Nibelheim with the news that Rill had simply disappeared. Because it would have been awkward for President Shinra to admit to plotting the murder of one of his most useful and popular employees. He had been trying to spin her as an AVALANCHE spy, but that had been stopped cold with a little help from Masamune.

The Turks, or rather Aeris, who seemed to be in on the loop, had talked Sephiroth down off the ledge. In the homicidal sense, mind you. He wasn't suicidal. Just really, really angry. Then again, if his girlfriend was being threatened, and he had the ability, Reno would probably want to kill the fat bastard too.

She was officially stylized as being 'absent without leave' and to be detained and returned to Shinra tower if she was sighted.

Off the clock, they were just trying to find her before AVALANCHE did.

The anti-Mako terrorists had gone after Aeris once before for her being an Ancient and somehow, they had learned that Rill was part of that race too.

Reno had spent the better part of the last five years out in the world trying to find Rill to bring her back home and to safety.

He got the impression that she didn't want to be found though.

Then again, this was the same girl who had devised feasible strategies for faking her own death as stress relief. The same person who in the span of two months revamped the entire SOLDIER program. Who over the course of three years got the Silver General to fall for her without even trying.

 _Poor Seph...The time you realize that you are hopelessly in love with a girl is the same time when she runs off and disappears. That's rough, yo..._ Sephiroth hadn't been doing well. He had Elmyra and Aeris Gainsborough as support, they were his mother and sister by now in every way that mattered, but he was still pining after Rill in a way that made Reno want to bang his head against the wall with frustration. The man had spent month after month scouring the four corners of the world looking for Rill and come up with nothing for his trouble. But he refused to proclaim her dead, and instead just kept looking. He had gone nonstop for two years until the next crisis came:

Zackery Faire and Cloud Strife, SOLDIER's 1st and 3rd Class, had also gone missing. Two more members of Sephiroth's group of friends that seemed to turn invisible. President Shinra declared them dead.

Aeris, an Ancient and Zack's girlfriend, believed otherwise.

 _Wherever they are, they are alive...but they're in pain. So much pain that I can barely hear them._

So Sephiroth had diverted his attention and energy from tracking down Rill, to finding Zack and Cloud. He trusted Aeris' claim that Rill was safe and unharmed, even if her location was unknown, even to her kin.

Reno was doing the same, in theory...

Right now though, the only thing he wanted to find was the bottom of another glass of...he thought it was whiskey. Maybe...

Someone sat next to him at the bar. Even muddled with booze, he catalogued that the person was female and wearing a dark coat, suitable for heavy travel. There was a staff angled across her back that had a few materia glowing in it and she sat as though she expected to need to move in a hurry. Her hood was up, so Reno couldn't see her face, but something was tickling his memory...

"Are you drunk enough to not remember seeing me?" The voice clinched it for him. Reno put his head down on the bar and started to laugh uncontrollably for a few minutes.

The girl, the woman, waited him out, chin in hand as she regarded him with dark blue eyes and a mischievous smile on her lips.

 _Rill...hot damn...How the hell were you not a Turk?_

"Give me five minutes."

-vVv-

"Ya know, I would have been happier if we just went with the long-time-no-see thing and not had any violence, yo..." Rill regarded Reno flatly, hand resting comfortably on her staff where she had just clouted the redheaded Turk over the head.

"Had to be done. You have kinda pissed me off." She said candidly.

"You-" Reno stopped rubbing his head. "Wait, what did I do, yo!?"

"Cosmo Canyon." She said flatly. "On of the last two redlions in existence." Her irritation flared and her hand tightened on her Wanderer's Staff.

Her old friend seemed to take a moment to process, then he went pale.

"Holy #$%..." He breathed. "You're the sage that that crazy old geezer was going on about!"

"Yes, I'm a sage. It's an old term for a Cetran magic specialist." She grumbled. "Goddess damnit Bugenhagen, you just love to brag..." Rill grounded the butt of her staff in the ground. "And you, Reno Sinclair, went and captured one of my friends and shipped him off to Professor Hojo's lab. So I'd say you owe me."

Reno grinned. "As if you need to hold anything over my head anyway. What do you need, Rill?"

"I know where Zack and Cloud are."


End file.
